Interview with Lucie Mariotto from the team that developed DanceNote.

So what is DanceNote?

DanceNote is an online tool created to facilitate the work of companies. The main feature is a video player that lets you view a choreography that has been recorded from multiple angles and on which you can add annotations. The tool makes it easier to understand the movement for dancers watching videos.

Where does the idea come from?

This comes from observing what dancers and choreographers needed. We are in regular contact with choreographers with La Fabrique de la Danse and interacting with them, observing the working methods of the companies that we met, we felt that a tool was missing. They told us they were using WeTransfer and Vimeo in addition to long emails with their dancers. They often lost time finding videos of the final rehearsals lost in gazillions emails. We were also aware of working methods involving often long creation times, with repetitions often distant in time. It was an opportunity for us to set up an intelligent video tool to facilitate the learning of a play by aggregating features to facilitate interactions within the artistic and technical teams.

How did you create it?

We proceeded in several steps. We first met choreographers in working groups to validate our hypothesis. We then looked for a technical partner to accompany us on the project. The developments, launched in May 2016, then took place in an iterative way, allowing to create a tool that is best adapted to the needs that we had identified.

Have you tested it with choreographers?

Precisely during this iterative phase I mentioned above, we met 11 choreographers and dance teachers, from different backgrounds, individually for 2 hours each. The objective of these meetings was to confront the platform as we imagined it to a tangible use of future users. These tests have allowed us to refine certain features and the user experience.